


A Breaking Vow

by Meddalarksen



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movies), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, In Canon Character Death, Talk of death and killing, references to violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 02:04:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meddalarksen/pseuds/Meddalarksen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt wakes from a nightmare of memories he wishes he could bury with his brother to find that they will not leave him even in his waking hours.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Breaking Vow

Kurt leaned back against his pillows, golden eyes fixed on the dark ceiling of his room.  He drew deep, steadying breaths and cursed the fact that there was no one beside him to ground him when he woke from dreams.  Closing his eyes, they snapped open as he was assaulted with images from his dream—no his memory.  The fight, the forest, the grass as he fell, the pain as Stefan’s fist connected, and the sickening snap as his brother’s neck broke. 

Sitting up and drawing his knees to his chest, the teleporter rested his forehead against them, trying to shake the memories of the dream.  If it wasn’t that one it was the mob that came after, or the battles that followed—watching friends and comrades fall.  The worst weren’t the nightmares, though.  They were of time nearly forgotten.  Three children: one dark, one fair, and one the color of the night sky, laughing, playing, and never believing that anything bad could enter their world.  He could have been happy there, and for a long time he was.  Then his brother in all but blood came to him.  Made him vow.  A word to one so dear as Stefan was one that he could not break, even if it cost him everything.  In the end it did.  He had never thought it a possibility, with the naïveté of a child.  But then—

Shoving the blankets away, Kurt all but threw himself from his bed and retreated to the open window of his room, looking out over the grounds.  He stood there for a long moment, arms and tail wrapped around his slender frame, golden gaze distant, the echo of a broken neck sounding across the years as loudly as it had in that clearing in Germany so many years before.  He tried, desperately, to send his mind past that time, back to days of easy laughter and gentle smiles.  To the feeling of safety within the small circus, the love between three children who saw past the others’ strangeness to the friend that existed within.  The joy of those years slipped through his fingers, leaving an aching pain in their place.  Margali, the only mother he had ever known, hated him.  Jimaine had not spoken to him in years.  And Stefan, dearest brother, Stefan’s bones lay beneath the earth outside a small Bavarian town—the neck fractured at an unnatural angle.

No longer able to see the grounds below him, trapped in the images from his past, Kurt rested his hands against the window sill and drew a deep breath, the cold air that heralded the first frost of autumn jarring him from the memory of the German glade.  He could feel a fire on his face, could hear Margali telling them all a long tale to pass the evening as she braided Jimaine’s hair, the boys tangled together for warmth: Kurt leaning against their mother’s side and Stefan leaning against Kurt.  Smiling faintly, the teleporter allowed himself to escape into the memory.  The crackle of the fire and the warmth of the family around him was enough to banish any doubts the child had possessed as to where he belonged.  He had never been made to feel less than a beloved son and brother, not until he kept his word to Stefan.

Two words.  That’s all it took to ruin lives: just two simple words spoken with a conviction that it was right.  It had been just the two of them that day.  Stefan had been wary and jumpy for weeks, and there was an odd look in his eyes when he watched his mother.  Kurt had cornered him, trying to determine what scared his brother so deeply.  The answer was beyond the scope of the child he was then.  Stefan feared himself.  Or, rather, what he could become.  His mother was a powerful sorceress and his father a fallen angel and the blood that ran through his veins from this heritage was strong in magic—dark magic.  Stefan, gentle Stefan, feared that he would be driven to lengths that their young minds refused to imagine.  He made his brother promise to stop him.  And Kurt agreed.  Should Stefan ever kill without cause, his brother would be there to stop him—no matter the cost. 

Nightcrawler could still remember the pleading look in Stefan’s dark eyes, even as his brother’s voice held firm “Swear to me.  Swear on us.  On all we hold dear, on us as brothers, as family.  That you will do what I ask of you.”  He had no idea then what that would cost them both.  He was hardly out of childhood, and Stefan was a gentle soul.  The teleporter’s voice had quavered slightly as he tried to brush past the idea, but Stefan had insisted.  “I swear.”  With those words he sealed their fates.

Kurt closed his eyes, jaw clenching as he tried to fight back any tears.  He had no right to grieve.  He could regret.  He could feel guilt.  But he did not deserve to grieve.  Not when it was at his hands that his beloved brother fell.  He could justify it to himself, and had for years: it was an accident, Stefan was delusional and murdering children, he was trying to keep his oath.  They all felt hollow.  And none of them changed a thing.  Stefan was dead, and it was rare that Kurt did not wake with the nauseating sound of a snapped neck in his ears.  This was his penance.


End file.
